Agriculture - English Heritage

Designation
Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture
September 2012

SCHEDULING SELECTION GUIDE:
AGRICULTURE
Contents
INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS .................2
HISTORICAL SUMMARY .............................................3
Phase I: the Prehistoric era ................................................ 3
Dartmoor and the south-west................................................4
Wessex and the south.................................................................4
The midlands.....................................................................................5
East Anglia............................................................................................5
Northern England...........................................................................6
The Roman period ............................................................. 7
The Anglo-Saxon period .................................................... 8
Phase II: the Middle Ages ................................................... 9
Phase III: post-medieval...................................................... 12
1550-1750........................................................................................12
1750-1875........................................................................................13
1875 to present............................................................................14
OVERARCHING DESIGNATION
CONSIDERATIONS .....................................................15
Scheduling and protection .............................................. 15
Selection criteria................................................................. 16
SPECIFIC CONSIDERATIONS WHEN
ASSESSING AGRICULTURAL REMAINS
FOR DESIGNATION ..................................................16
PROTECTION THROUGH MANAGEMENT .........16
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................16
Cover Image: Medieval ridge and furrow in the Cheviot Hills (Northumberland)
surrounds probably prehistoric farmsteads.
Fig 1. Survey confirms irregular fields on the coastal plateau at Bosigran, Zennor (Cornwall)
have prehistoric origins, contemporary with round houses and courtyard houses (Iron Age
and Romano-British; not scheduled) right of centre. Most fields are farmed; abandoned
ones lie on the margins, especially on the higher cliff slopes. Cliffs and the downs above
provided summer grazing. Part of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape WHS.
INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITIONS
This selection guide offers an overview of the sorts of
archaeological monument or site associated with agriculture
(including husbandry) which are likely to be deemed to have
national importance, and for which of those scheduling may be
appropriate. It aims to do two things: to set these within their
historical context, and to give an introduction to the designation
approaches employed.
Until the eighteenth century most people lived on the land,
with a greater or lesser involvement in farming. Agricultural
landscapes often still reflect regional biases towards arable or
pastoral farming, and to particular local specialisms such as the
orchards of Worcestershire’s Teme Valley or sheep farming on
the northern Fells. Some landscapes are of extremely long
standing, such as the ‘ancient countrysides’ of the south-west
where the small and irregular fields surrounded by hedges and
earth and stone banks are in some cases (but not invariably)
several thousand years old. Others are more recent, such
as the hawthorn-hedged grid-fields of the English midlands,
generally laid out from scratch in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. These replaced earlier agricultural landscapes, some
of which have left highly visible reminders like the curving ridge
and furrow of the medieval and later open fields which still
underlies much permanent pasture.
Agricultural landscapes are dynamic. While there are notable
exceptions (as noted below), in most parts of England premedieval
agricultural features, such as land boundaries, are
generally reckoned to have been largely swept away at least
insofar as the naked eye is concerned, although techniques
like aerial photography, lidar (Light Detection And Ranging),
geophysical survey and area excavations are increasingly
revealing extensive buried landscapes. A further rider should
2

Fig 2 A section of the scheduled reave system, Holne Moor, Dartmoor. Regular, apparently
planned, land divisions called reaves were laid out over much of Dartmoor from around
1700 BC. They were also laid out off the moor, but there survive far less well.
The reason for this extensive land-gridding remains unclear: demarkating land ownership,
and agricultural exploitation, are assumed to be involved.
be offered, as current research is suggesting that rather more
pre-medieval landscapes survive, fossilized in the present
countryside, than was previously thought.
This selection guide is intended to give a very broad overview
of the main phases of development, and of the main types
of agricultural sites and landscapes. In terms of survival, three
broad phases can be defined. The first covers the prehistoric,
Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods. While there are exceptions
– notably in uplands such as Dartmoor and Exmoor - most of
what remains from this phase is buried invisibly below ground
as archaeological features and deposits. Over the last decade
the potential for the archaeological survival of extensive
‘invisible’ agricultural landscapes of early prehistoric and later
date has been shown by large-scale excavations such as those
in advance of Heathrow Terminal 5 and the Channel Tunnel
Rail Link (in Kent), as well as by ever-more rapid geophysical
survey methods as exemplified by work at West Heslerton
(North Yorkshire). For this essentially pre-historic phase, before
the advent of large-scale written record keeping, archaeological
investigation is the principal avenue for understanding farming
regimes, from how the land was laid out, to what stock was
kept and how it was managed - in this case principally via the
recovery of vertebrate remains from well-sealed contexts (such
as middens, ditches and pits). The second phase of development
is the Middle Ages, the five centuries following the Norman
Conquest, when as well as below-ground archaeological
remains there is a great richness of visible earthworks,
complemented from the thirteenth century by abundant
historical evidence such as manorial accounts. The third phase
of development covers the post-medieval centuries. Here,
because of the large number of surviving structures, there is a
greater emphasis on listing; the relevant criteria are set out in a
complementary Agricultural Buildings listing selection guide.
HISTORICAL SUMMARY
PHASE I: THE PREHISTORIC ERA
Sometime around 4000 BC people switched from procuring
food by a combination of hunting and gathering to growing
cereals and raising domestic livestock - traits which define
the Neolithic period. There remains much debate, however,
about how many of the population were settled farmers;
unequivocal evidence for permanent dwellings is rare and
cereals (which imply a settled population) may not have been
the major element in people’s diet. It is certainly possible that
many Neolithic communities were semi-mobile pastoralists
(with growing evidence for the movement of domestic animals
over large distances), which also practised cereal cultivation
on small plots of land and gathered wild plants. Visible traces
of these early farmers are rare; although excavations have
occasionally found the score-marks left by early ploughs hidden
beneath prehistoric burial mounds they are not necessarily
representative of routine land-use. Some clearance cairns and
banks (see below) may be this early. The remains of domestic
animals evidence their introduction, husbandry and transport.
Around 1500 BC, in the Middle Bronze Age, the English
landscape began to change, as alongside settlements (see the
Settlements scheduling selection guide) relatively large areas
of countryside began to be divided up into blocks of fields
(see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/iha-fieldsystems/).
That perhaps indicates a larger population and a
greater demand for food, as well as developments in agricultural
technology allowing agricultural expansion. This period saw the
continuation of broadly warm and dry conditions, and upland
areas such as Dartmoor, the North York Moors, the Pennines
and the Cheviots all saw fairly intensive farming up to altitudes
of over 250 metres above sea level – much higher than was
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 3

Fig 3. High Close, Grassington, North Yorkshire. Underlying the generally straight-edged
field walls dating from enclosure in 1792 is an older co-axial fieldscape, largely scheduled
(‘Grassington enclosures’). Its origins appear to be late prehistoric; use and modification
may have continued for many centuries.
ever the case again. Superficially the agricultural landscapes
created at this time can look similar, with blocks of small
square or rectangular fields defined by hedges and ditches or
walls lying alongside tracks and droveways which connected
settlements and gave access to outlying pastures. Then, around
1250 BC, the climate deteriorated; exploitation of many upland
areas decreased leaving the settlement remains fossilized, and
sometimes heath and moorland developed and peat growth
began. Somewhat later, changes in social organisation and
agricultural practices in the Iron Age seem to have led to
the abandonment or reduced maintenance of lowland field
systems and their replacement by more extensive systems of
linear ditches and pit alignments; examples of both have been
scheduled. What follows is a broad indication of some of the
main regional variety in prehistoric agricultural remains; it does
not attempt a comprehensive summary.
Dartmoor and the south-west: The use of stone for their
construction, and the relative absence of later human activity,
means that the prehistoric landscapes of Dartmoor are
exceptionally legible. By or soon after 1300 BC Dartmoor had
been divided up into separate land units, each with valley land,
hill-slopes and high open moorland, the last probably used for
common grazing. Defining these areas, and on the better land
subdividing them into field systems, are multiple parallel stone
banks, locally called ‘reaves’. Only in plan can the remarkable
regularity of the field systems (called ‘co-axial’ by archaeologists)
be fully appreciated, with the reaves dividing up extensive blocks
of land, in one case (around Rippon Tor) covering some 3,300
hectares (about 6 by 6 kilometres). The consensus is that this
represents landscape replanning on a major scale, presumably
ordered or initiated by the political elite, though others see the
alignments of reaves as emergent within older traditions of tenure
and land use, rather than consciously structured and planned.
This makes the point that these types of remains can yield
some of the clearest evidence for social change, and are not
just about food production. Elsewhere in the south-west other
types of field system have been found both on the mainland
and on the Isles of Scilly where some have been submerged
by the sea. For instance, the West Penwith coastal strip in
Cornwall is typified by small, irregular, fields of prehistoric
origin bounded by stone banks, demonstrably of more than
one phase. On Stannon Down, on the edge of Bodmin Moor,
excavations in 1968 found stone houses associated with strip
fields, perhaps small plots used for cereal cultivation, and larger
irregular enclosures probably representing stock corrals. Later
in the Iron Age, what was perhaps increasing specialism in
animal husbandry and herding gave rise to a distinctive type
of enclosed settlement with a long narrow approach, ditched
on either side, which flared outwards near the outer entrance
to facilitate stock management (although other activities
have been evidenced too). Found elsewhere in England, and
especially Wessex (in all some 200 examples are known in
England), these are called banjo enclosures (see http://www.
english-heritage.org.uk/publications/iha-banjo-enclosures/) as
in plan they resemble that musical instrument. Typically these
are scheduled. As in parts of upland northern England, groups
of small cairns of stones (and single larger cairns) evidence
prehistoric land clearance. Examples are scheduled, for instance
on Bodmin Moor.
Wessex and the south: Settlement was relatively dense on
the Wessex chalklands, on the surrounding heaths and vales,
and on the Sussex Downs. Here are some of the best-known
prehistoric agricultural landscapes, still known to many by their
traditional name of ‘Celtic fields’. However, this ethnic label
has been discarded by archaeologists who now divide early
fields into a number of different classifications. Before farming
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 4

Fig 5. Medieval and later ridge and furrow at Nobold (Northamptonshire). To the right,
ridging stops at the edge of the settlement remains, suggesting cultivation while the village
remained occupied. Left of the hollow way, however, remains are overlain by ridges, postdating
settlement desertion (which occurred by the 1670s). Settlement and ridge and
furrow are scheduled. Modern ploughing has eradicated surrounding ridge and furrow
beyond the scheduled area.
intensified in the mid twentieth century these field systems
were widespread on the downlands and elsewhere, but now
mainly survive on steep slopes which have escaped modern
ploughing, as well as on the Salisbury Plain military estate where
farming ceased over a century ago. These are generally fairly
small square or rectangular fields defined by low banks, and
are sometimes so regularly laid out and so extensive, covering
5 square kilometres or more, that they can be thought of
as co-axial systems; as with the Dartmoor reaves, large-scale
landscape re-organisation is suggested. Similar field systems
are also found in Sussex. However, despite the ambition of
their conceivers and their scale, there is strong evidence that
some systems in Wessex, at least, were abandoned in the
centuries after 1000 BC. That evidence comes in the form of
sinuous, long-distance bank-and-ditch boundaries which cut
across them, boundaries (‘ranch boundaries’ is the usual term
used) which look as if they demarcate some form of land
ownership. The Salisbury plain settlements and field systems
are heavily scheduled, particularly where they are associated
with settlement.
In some areas valley sides and hill slopes carry steeply-stepped
cultivation terraces called lynchets. The dating of these is
problematic, and certainly they were being used in the Middle
Ages. However, some clearly are of prehistoric origin (as
suggested by excavation of a series of lynchets at Horton, near
Devizes, Wiltshire), and archaeology suggests a date between
1500 and 1000 BC for their creation. Examples are scheduled,
especially in conjunction with other features.
Later on in the Iron Age the appearance of large numbers of banjo
enclosures across Wessex might suggest a reorientation to a more
pastoral economy, perhaps reflecting impoverishment of the
downland soils. A half-dozen Wessex examples are scheduled.
The midlands: Although almost wholly erased by later
agriculture, air photography and developer-funded excavations
indicate that here too there were co-axial field systems,
abandoned at the end of the Bronze Age. North of a line
between the Severn estuary and the Wash, however, such
systems are much rarer. The Trent Valley, for instance, seems
to lack any formal field boundaries, remaining unenclosed well
into the 1st millennium BC. Then, in the later Iron Age, the
Trent and other midland river valleys were divided up by field
systems and long-distance boundaries. Such land boundaries
were banks and ditches, but sometimes alignments of closelyspaced
pits, a metre or so wide and deep. Often running off at
right-angles from a river these boundaries suggest territories
each with a range of resources from river-valley meadows and
grassland, via an arable zone, to upland woodland and grazing.
Air photography has shown how many river valleys, especially
gravelly ones like those of the Thames and Trent, had complex
prehistoric agricultural landscapes taking advantage of the fertile
and free-draining soils. Some of these have seen excavation
in advance of gravel extraction. In Derbyshire’s Peak District
cairnfields from land clearance and Bronze Age field walls show
that here too the uplands were farmed in prehistory.
East Anglia: Here evidence of the organisation of the
prehistoric countryside has come largely from air photography
and excavation; there was little stone so fields were bounded
not by walls but by ditches and hedges, and these rarely survive
as earthworks. Once again, extensive co-axial field systems
have been identified in a number of places, as in central-north
Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, sometimes fossilized in the modern
field pattern. One of the best known is the Scole-Dickleburgh
System of south Norfolk; there remains much debate about its
date, although it is generally accepted that a Roman road bisects
(and thus post-dates) it. Not surprisingly, areas around the wet
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 5

Fig 6. Fields have buried archaeologies. Here the dark, parallel, furrows of ploughed-out
ridge and furrow are revealed by large-scale earth stripping across an Iron Age settlement
at Coton Park, Rugby (Warwickshire). The furrows’ straightness and regularity suggests
they were created by post-medieval horse ploughing.
fen edge with its abundant lowland grassland and marshes
seem to have largely relied on pastoralism, and at places like
Fengate, near Peterborough, small rectangular fields (some
with wells) and droveways bounded by ditches and hedges
were presumably for stock. Indeed, some complex Bronze Age
enclosure systems at Fengate and elsewhere can be interpreted
as stockyards and ‘races’ for herding large flocks of sheep. Work
in 2011 in advance of clay extraction at Must Farm, also east
of Peterborough, emphasised the potential for the survival of
extensive and high-quality buried landscapes, here waterlogged
and with excellent preservation of organic remains. An area
at Fengate, associated with the Flag Fen Visitor Centre and the
excavations it interprets is scheduled, but otherwise schedulings
in this area of monuments of this type and date are rare given
that so many are integral parts of modern landscapes, often
under arable cultivation, or are sufficiently deeply buried as to
be hard to define spatially.
Northern England: Unsurprisingly, patterns similar to those
in upland south-west England recur. On the high uplands of
the Yorkshire Dales – in Swaledale, Wensleydale, Ribblesdale,
Littondale and Wharfedale – extensive co-axial field systems are
found and also cairnfields suggesting land improvement, perhaps
for arable cultivation. Lynchets occur on steeply sloping ground;
mostly these seem medieval, but as elsewhere prehistoric
origins cannot be ruled out. Elsewhere, more discrete farming
landscapes are suggested; in the Cheviots, for instance, one
group of five or six stone-built roundhouses stood within a
field system of 2.75 hectares or so. L- and C-shaped enclosures
and short dykes on the hills of Northumbria and elsewhere
are assumed to represent shelters for grazing animals. The
point that prehistoric agriculture, and thus landscapes, was in
some cases highly regionally distinctive, is made emphatically
on the chalk Wolds of east Yorkshire where aerial photography
has revealed about 125 so-called ladder settlements of the
later Iron Age. These comprise small, contiguous, agricultural
enclosures (the ‘settlement’ element of the name is something
of a misnomer) arranged alongside one or both sides of a
trackway, extending from a few hundred metres to more
than a mile. They seem well suited to stock rearing, but also
provided segregated areas for growing crops and other tasks.
Another example is provided by the distribution of cord rig,
parallel cultivation ridges apparently normally of later prehistoric
date, found principally on uplands in the border counties.
Eleven examples are scheduled in Northumbria, all associated
with settlement remains. That agricultural landscapes were
far from static has been shown, for instance, by excavation
and geophysical survey at Wharram Percy (North Yorkshire),
where fields and roads were re-ordered several times from the
prehistoric period onwards.
There is an increasing body of evidence regarding the management
of wild resources in the prehistoric period, for instance woodland
management. Mostly this is in the form of biological remains and
artefacts recovered from excavation. Structural evidence is much
rarer, although weirs and traps (river and coastal) of Neolithic
and later date attest to fishing and wildfowling (see http://www.
english-heritage.org.uk/publications/iha-river-fisheries-coastalfish-weirs/).
Sea fish is thought to have been an important part of
the diet of coastal dwellers from early prehistory, as evidenced
by large shell and fish bone middens (waste heaps); examples
are scheduled on the Isles of Scilly and Northumberland, in the
latter case as part of a larger site. Active methods of fishing,
with nets or lines from boats, whether on the coast or on rivers,
leave little or no archaeological trace. Passive fishing, however
(using constructed weirs and traps within estuaries and
inter-tidal areas), is evidenced from the early Neolithic onwards.
Numbers of Bronze Age wickerwork fish traps have been
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 6

Fig 7. Lynchets – cultivation terraces – in the Ingram Valley, Northumberland. Examples
nearby have prehistoric origins but clear, pronounced, examples such as these were probably
constructed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when population levels and land hunger
were at their greatest. Medieval ridge and furrow to their right partly overlies the lynchets.
About thirty examples of lynchet systems are scheduled in England, although not this.
identified eroding from the Humber foreshore; although these
may be reckoned of national importance, none have been
recommended for scheduling (see special considerations below).
Bronze Age wicker fish (or eel) traps were also among the finds
at Must Farm (Peterborough) in 2011.
THE ROMAN PERIOD
Traditionally the Roman conquest of Britain in 43 AD was seen
to herald dramatic change as European civilization arrived in the
forms of towns linked by straight roads, and in the countryside
opulent villas with lavish bath suites which were presumed to
be estate centres (for villa complexes see the Settlement
scheduling selection guide and http://www.english-heritage.
org.uk/publications/iha-prehistoric-romano-british-settlementsstructures/).
After the Second World War archaeology in
particular markedly revised this rather simplistic picture,
showing how much continuity there was from the Iron Age and
increasingly how, just as later, there was considerable regional
variation across England in the character of the countryside
and the types of farming practised. Many field systems and
agricultural landscapes (http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/
publications/iha-field-systems/) established in the prehistoric era
continued to be used and to evolve further; others were new.
But whatever the form of the fields, the working rural lowland
landscape can be characterised as one of dispersed farms and
hamlets, each surrounded by its own fields; other resources (for
instance, grassland and woodland) may have been shared. The
construction of lime kilns may indicate attempts to improve
poor soils as well as reflecting the growing need for building
mortar (see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/
iha-preindustrial-lime-kilns/). Overall, it seems that Imperial
control and demands for tax and surplus produce like grain had
a radical impact on the countryside in parts at least of England;
this will undoubtedly be the focus of future research.
In some areas, as in the East Anglian Fens and the Severn
Estuary Levels, there were major land drainage and reclamation
schemes using sea banks with ditch systems behind them (see
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/iha-romanmedieval-sea-river-flood-defences/).
Lush pastureland may have
been the main new resource, and inland the improvement by
ditching of riverside hay meadows may have been practised.
On the Fens, which may then have been an imperial estate, the
reclamation was on a huge scale suggesting state promotion,
as indeed occurred in other parts of the Empire. Air photos
and excavation have revealed extensive areas of small, squarish,
fields laid out with considerable regularity. Some of the
Fenland watercourses were large-scale, and the main function
of the scheduled Car Dyke which runs for 85 miles through
Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, long thought to be a canal for
grain transport, may have been drainage. In some places at least
corn was ground using a watermill (see http://www.englishheritage.org.uk/publications/iha-mills/);
only about ten examples
are known or suspected, but this probably hugely underrepresents
what may have been a relatively commonplace
type of structure. Both corn drying and bread ovens seem to
have been fairly common, suggesting the importance of grainbased
staples. Scheduled examples are invariably known from
excavation and form part of wider designated sites.
As in other periods, the production of particular high status
foodstuffs may have left archaeological traces. Bone evidence
shows fallow deer were kept, and presumably hunted, at firstcentury
Fishbourne (West Sussex). Vineyards are suggested
by historical sources, and parallel planting trenches found
during excavations in the Nene Valley in Northamptonshire are
indicative of viticulture. About twenty artificial fishponds, small,
lined with stone or clay and often associated with villas, have
been discovered through excavation; many more undoubtedly
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 7

Fig 8. Sheepcote earthworks, Pinnock, Temple Guiting, Gloucestershire. Sheep farming,
for wool, characterised the medieval Cotswolds. It has left an archaeology, notably in the
earthworks of the long, narrow, sheepcote sheds (bercarie) where flocks were sheltered
and lambed. Not scheduled.
remain to be identified (see http://www.english-heritage.org.
uk/publications/iha-animal-management/). Fresh-water and sea
fishing is evidenced by bone evidence (although as yet there is
no evidence of coastal fish traps), while the quantities of oyster
shells typically found on Roman sites suggest industrial-scale
production of shell fish.
THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD
Much remains to be discovered about agriculture in the half
millennium and more after the end of formal Roman rule.
Very few historic documents survive from the period, and
those that do are more concerned with political change than
with the practicalities of everyday life. Archaeology, therefore,
has an important part to play in revealing the story. In some
parts of the country (and pollen evidence from bogs is a
key source for this) land was abandoned at the end of the
Roman period and reverted to woodland; Wychwood, in
Oxfordshire, is one area where this took place. However, this
may have been less common than was thought 30 years ago.
Elsewhere, and field walking in Northamptonshire has provided
evidence of this in the form of concentrations of pottery
sherds marking settlement sites, the land continued to be
cultivated from hamlets or perhaps farm groupings representing
extended families. Much more research is needed before we
can speak with certainty about whether the fields and land
units associated with these were inherited and longstanding,
or whether there was reconfiguration. There is, for instance,
growing evidence that in the mid Saxon period rounded fields
(sometimes termed oval enclosures) of between 30 and 200
acres surrounded by hedges were laid out around settlements
in many parts of England, seemingly shared by the place’s
farmers, although sometimes forming the demesne (that is the
lord’s) land. By the tenth century furlongs, subdivided into
strips, are documented, although this is not to suggest that the
true, large-scale open fields of medieval England (or two or
three-course rotations) had yet evolved (or been deliberately
created by replanning). Some of this evidence comes from
documents, but increasingly archaeology is supplying data, such
as that from Frocester (Gloucestershire) where excavation
revealed the gradual encroachment of arable cultivation,
probably in an open field, first up to and then over the rubble
of a Roman villa.
It must also be acknowledged that the impact of the
Scandinavian settlers (Vikings) on how the land of northern
and eastern England was organised and farmed from the later
ninth century remains unclear, and specifically Scandinavian
farms or settlements from which land was farmed remain hard
to identify. However, a case has recently been made for a Viking
origin for co-axial field systems in north-east Suffolk.
As always, there was geographical as well as chronological
variation in farming landscapes and methodologies. For
instance, it seems to be in the Anglo-Saxon period that
large, open, greens or commons became a typical feature
of the Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Essex and East Anglia
countrysides. Many appear to be cleared woodland, and to
have been associated with stock management and droving.
Archaeology is also our principal source for Anglo-Saxon
technology, such as watermills, where crops were processed.
As yet there is no evidence for Roman mills being kept in use;
rather it looks as if watermills (predominantly simple horizontal
ones) were reintroduced at some stage, were relatively
common (as evidenced by charters and place-names) by
the ninth century and proliferated in the tenth and eleventh
centuries as agricultural production intensified. Domesday
Book lists over 5,000. Where examples have been located
and excavated, especially where waterlogged conditions have
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 8

Fig 9. A scheduled shieling 3 km north of Carrawbrough on Hadrian’s Wall. The sheltercomplex
lies next to a stream, with land that at some stage was under the plough on
the far side. Most shielings are of twelfth to seventeenth century date; normally only
excavation will date specific examples.
preserved woodwork (as at Tamworth, in Staffordshire), the
insights provided, not least into technology and woodworking,
can be vivid and compelling (see http://www.english-heritage.
org.uk/publications/iha-mills/). Exceptional both in scale (this
may have been a royal enterprise) and preservation is the late
seventh-century tidal mill (its pound-ponds filled by the tide)
discovered at Northfleet (Kent) in 2002.
Exploitation of wild resources continued during this period, and
is sometimes alluded to in documentary sources. Domesday
Book, for instance, indicates the presence of numerous largescale
fisheries, both inland and coastal. Archaeological evidence
of inland fisheries is generally lacking, although seventh-century
and later fish weirs, some of them V-plan structures over 300
metres from end to end, have been found at several coastal
locations including the Severn Estuary, north Norfolk, Suffolk,
and the Isle of Wight. Examples on the Essex coast have been
scheduled (see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/
iha-river-fisheries-coastal-fish-weirs/).
PHASE II: THE MIDDLE AGES
In the late Saxon period (around the tenth century AD) there
was a huge reorganisation of the countryside over much
of lowland England. Across much of midland and southern
England compact nucleated villages replaced the scattered
hamlets and single farms which had been the norm. Around
these new villages the arable land was reorganised into large,
prairie-like open fields which were predominantly devoted to
cereal cultivation, and which have long been recognised as a
classic form of historic agricultural landscape, which in some
parts of especially midland England dominated the countryside
for a thousand years (see http://www.english-heritage.org.
uk/publications/iha-field-systems/). These open fields were
subdivided into furlongs, themselves split into long, narrow
allotments or strips. Each farmer (other than the poorest)
would have twenty or so such strips, scattered throughout the
open fields ensuring that everyone had a share of good land
and bad. Importantly, probably after the Norman Conquest
as land became scarcer, the communal regulation of fallow
(unsown) arable land was introduced. This defines the arrival
of a key feature of the management of true common, as
opposed to open, fields: typically, that each year one of a
settlement’s three common fields would be left uncultivated
and grazed communally to allow some fertility to be regained.
Especially where the land was heavy, particularly clay-based,
farmers ploughed their strips so that they were ridged towards
the middle, allowing rainwater to run off in the intermediate
furrows. This ridge and furrow form of cultivation, used well
beyond the Middle Ages in parts of the country, produced one
of the most distinctive, and once one of the commonest, types
of archaeological earthwork in lowland England. In the 1970s
and 1980s, however, European subsidies and more powerful
tractors and ploughs saw the ploughing flat of huge swathes of
ridge and furrow and it is now far scarcer than previously. Some
examples have been scheduled, generally in association with
designated settlement remains, demonstrating the relationship
between the two.
Either side of central England large villages were rarer, and
for the most part people lived in various types of what
geographers call dispersed settlements: scattered hamlets and
farms. The field patterns associated with these tend to be more
varied, often reflecting a greater emphasis on animal husbandry.
Again, some examples have already been scheduled, such as at
Butleigh, Somerset.
For several hundred years, up until the early fourteenth century,
the population of England grew steadily, and more and more
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 9

Fig 10. One of several pillow mounds (artificial mounds-with-burrows for rabbit breeding)
which run down the Cotswold scarp at Wotton under Edge, Gloucestershire, marking
an unscheduled rabbit warren. The earthworks of a probable warrener’s house overlook
the site, which is likely to be eighteenth- or nineteenth-century. Warrens of this date are
relatively common, and scheduling requires careful assessment.
land was devoted to cereal cultivation. By the thirteenth
land hunger led to a great deal of inherently poor land being
ploughed up, and in hillier parts of England – Wessex, the
Cotswolds, Herefordshire and parts of Yorkshire, for instance
– cultivation terraces or lynchets were created (or prehistoric
ones reoccupied) to allow the cultivation of steep hillsides.
About thirty examples are scheduled in England.
The villages, hamlets and farms from which fields were worked
are the subject of a separate Settlement scheduling selection
guide, but it may be noted that at some scheduled sites, normally
where the site is deserted (for instance, Hound Tor, Devon)
earthworks and collapsed stone walls reveal the remains of
longhouses where people shared their dwellings with their
stock, as well as barns, and other agricultural structures such as
drying kilns. Standing medieval agricultural buildings (for which
see the Agricultural Buildings listing selection guide) survive
in some numbers, notably barns. Used both for threshing and
storage, these structures, often built on a monumental scale and
incorporating extremely sophisticated carpentry, bear witness
to the scale and organisation of farming on major estates.
Among the earliest identified are two at Cressing Temple, Essex,
where the timbers for the Barley Barn were felled between
1205 and 1235. Dovecotes are the second type of medieval
agricultural building to survive in considerable numbers: 128
are scheduled, and 2,283 listed. As providers of fresh meat and
eggs to high-status households, and of fertiliser, these structures
sometimes received careful architectural treatment, as with the
fourteenth-century example at Kinwarton, Warwicks.hire
Monastic investment, in particular, can be seen in upland and
other ‘marginal’ areas where land was improved to make it
more productive and profitable. Outlying monastic territories
were often cultivated from new farm complexes, which the
Cistercians called granges; where appropriate, their sites are
scheduled. Many survive as modern farms, others are marked
by earthworks. Some had a specialist function, like dairying. In
upland areas sheep farming tended to predominate, whether
this was run from granges or from valley-bottom farms and
villages. Lambing and shearing was often done in the hills in
long, narrow, shelters called sheepcotes; in the Cotswolds, at
least, these have left distinctive earthworks as at Temple Guiting,
on the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, where the sheepcote is
one element of a scheduled medieval farmstead. In some
of the most extreme upland areas, especially in the north,
herdsmen used temporary huts or shielings for accommodation,
perhaps when high pastures were grazed in the summer.
Typically these are scheduled; one exceptional group of four
scheduled shielings is at Kingwater, Cumbria. Often one or more
enclosures for stock management were attached. In some areas
such seasonal practices may have been common for hundreds
or even thousands of years (see http://www.english-heritage.
org.uk/publications/iha-shielings/).
In the Middle Ages a great deal of effort went into water
management. In low-lying fenland and coastal areas the
medieval land hunger stimulated often highly ambitious
and well-capitalised schemes to drain land to create more
farmland, and dykes, banks and sea defence banks (often
now well inland) can survive as evidence (see http://www.
english-heritage.org.uk/publications/iha-roman-medieval-seariver-flood-defences/).
Riverside hay meadows were generally
highly valued, and channels and sluices may have been used,
for instance on monastic estates, to improve their quality by
controlled irrigation. Identification of these on the ground has
hardly begun, but it seems likely that some will have already
been included in the more extensive schedulings of monastic
complexes. Religious observance meant a great deal of fresh
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 10

Fig 11. A dewpond - that is an artificial stockpond, carefully lined with clay, chalk, straw
and cobbles - next to a Birdsall Estate high barn on the arid Yorkshire Wolds. Out-farm,
pond and the surrounding enclosed landscape of large, straight-edged fields are all
broadly contemporary, and late eighteenth-century. Dewponds are sometimes scheduled
as elements of wider landscapes of national importance.
fish was eaten – bream, tench, pike, and, from the later Middle
Ages, carp – and most monasteries and manor houses had
their own fishponds. Where there was a convenient valleybottom
stream, one or more ponds could be created using
earth dams. Elsewhere large, shallow, rectangular ponds were
often dug, sometimes in a linked sequence of three or four
of different sizes to allow the management of fish of different
types and ages. Where they survive in good condition, without
later scouring which will have removed bottom deposits, and
especially where they are parts of wider medieval complexes,
fishponds will typically be recommended for scheduling.
Riverine and coastal fisheries supplied commercial stocks
(see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/iha-riverfisheries-coastal-fish-weirs/),
although the large coastal fish traps
which were operational from the seventh century seem to have
fallen out of use by the thirteenth. One possible reason for
that is that by then fishing boats were active in large numbers,
landing commercial catches of cheap fish like herring, as well as
larger species like cod.
Dams, ponds and channels (or leats) were also engineered to
power the many thousands of watermills. Most manors had
one by the time of Domesday (1086); investment in mills with
vertical wheels, which became the norm, and the installation of
professional millers by lords of the manor, may well have been
elements of post-Conquest manorialisation. Windmills, which
were always rarer (not least because they cost even more to
build than vertical watermills), arrived in England about 1200.
Their sites, usually on hills or raised ground to catch the breeze,
are often marked by low, round mounds which helped anchor
the ‘cross-trees’, the huge cross-shaped timber base of the mill.
These mill mounds can be easily mistaken for prehistoric burial
mounds; a cross-shaped depression across the centre where
the cross-tree has rotted is a sure indicator that a mound
once supported a mill (see http://www.english-heritage.org.
uk/publications/iha-mills/). Confirmed examples of medieval
mill sites which survive in good condition will always be strong
candidates for scheduling, especially when in association with
settlement remains, fishponds, and so on.
Larger landowners, whether lords of manors, aristocrats or
monasteries, engaged in other specialist forms of resource
management to provide further high-status foodstuffs, and
some have left distinctive archaeological remains. Deer hunting
was popular as the chase simulated aspects of warfare – thus
providing training in horsemanship and weapon-handling
– and because it supplied venison, always one of the most
prestigious of meats. The king tended to hunt over open
countryside, especially in his forests. Other lords created parks
(for which see the designed landscapes selection guide on
Rural Landscapes) where deer were managed before being
hunted. Keeping high-leaping deer in captivity was always a
problem, and parks were usually bounded by a pale comprising
tall oak posts set on a bank; an inner ditch made any attempted
escape both a long as well as a high jump. The earthworks
of these park pales sometimes survive, whether as wood
boundaries or beneath hedges in open countryside. Examples,
as at Tutbury in Staffordshire, have been scheduled, especially
where other components of the park survive. Where stone
was readily to hand, especially in upland areas, the bank might
be surmounted by a wall rather than a fence. Here listing rather
than scheduling will be favoured for designation. Deer poaching
was a problem, so the deer manager or parker usually lived
within the park in an isolated lodge, ideally on high ground for
good visibility, but elsewhere surrounded with a water-filled
moat for security. Good examples are scheduled. Rabbits,
introduced along with fallow deer by the Normans, and game
birds like partridges, were kept in warrens; again, banks, ditches
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 11

Fig 12. Dead straight late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century enclosure-period field
walls run uphill from an abandoned farm at Gossipgate, Cumbria. This stands at the
traditional divide between farmland and uncultivated upland grazing.
and walls kept them in, and predators and poachers out. These
often contained specialist structures such as vermin traps, and
especially the long earthwork ‘pillow’ mounds which provided
rabbits with artificial burrows. Over fifty examples of pillow
mounds are scheduled, typically where a whole warren survives
or as elements of multi-period sites, as on Minchinhampton
Common (Gloucestershire); early (that is medieval or
early modern) examples will be favoured over eighteenth
or nineteenth century ones which are far commoner. At
Colmworth (Bedfordshire) a scheduled earthwork associated
with a moated site is interpreted as having been for fowling.
Until the later Middle Ages, when the climate became wetter
and cooler with the Little Ice Age starting about 1550 (and
continuing until about 1850), vineyards remained relatively
common, although their English heyday seems to have been the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. Sunny, south-facing hillsides were
probably the favoured location, modified by terracing and the
digging of planting trenches.
Another aspect of agricultural activity of considerable
importance was woodland management and forestry. This
is now well understood from the documentary record,
from the timbers in surviving medieval buildings and from
palaeoenvironmental investigations. Archaeology also has a part
to play: notably along riverfronts, as in London, excavations have
revealed further massive timber structures, further enhancing
our knowledge of woodland management and woodworking
techniques. Survey of ancient woodlands often reveals the
banks and ditches which defined and protected compartments
where coppice wood was grown, although the dating of
such features is difficult without corroborative documentary
evidence, notably early maps. A few are scheduled.
Charcoal burning was a related activity which is evidenced
archaeologically by the platforms where stacks of wood were
slowly burnt and transformed into charcoal. Only one platform,
however, in Derbyshire, is scheduled.
PHASE III: POST-MEDIEVAL
1550-1750
From this period onwards, designation of agricultural sites
becomes increasingly a matter of listing of buildings, which has
already gone some considerable way towards capturing the
transformation of the countryside seen between the sixteenth
and twentieth centuries. These were the period which saw
the majority of medieval open fields enclosed to create the
modern landscape of hedged and walled fields. Initially this
tended to be a gradual process, with the new field boundaries
fossilising the curving ones of strips and furlongs. At the same
time many of the extensive areas of woods and forests which
had survived clearance in the medieval centuries were felled
and the land divided into fields. Commons and heaths were
similarly portioned out and improved. Much of this land
was of inherently poor quality, and lime kilns (used to burn
limestone to make lime) and marl pits (where marl, a chalky
subsoil spread to improve soil quality, was dug) show how
attempts were made to overcome this. Over 150 lime kilns are
designated via listing and scheduling; henceforward listing is likely
to be the favoured approach for standing examples. Surviving
wetlands, like the Somerset Levels and the East Anglian Fens
(here, in the mid seventeenth century, with the assistance of
the Dutchman, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden), saw another phase
of drainage; windmill-driven pumps were among the new
technology employed to achieve this. The countryside we see
today frequently carries evidence of these transformations.
Notably in the flat, chalkland, valley bottoms of Wessex –
Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire – it was these centuries that
saw the creation of floated water meadows, which remained
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 12

Fig 13. Watermeadow management at Charlton-All-Saints (Wiltshire) in the 1920s.
A drowner cleans a channel which carries water, brought off the River Avon, along the
ridged pane. As it flows along, water trickles down the sides of the pane, irrigating the grass.
Drains in the furrows carry the water away. Controlling the level of channels and drains
was complex.
characteristic of this part of England until they fell out of use
in the earlier twentieth century. Networks of channels were
cut to carry water from valley-bottom rivers and streams
across the adjacent meadows and, at certain times of the year,
to flood them when the channels were deliberately blocked.
This promoted grass growth, giving sheep an early bite in the
spring and heavy hay crops in high summer. Taken together
these things enabled more stock to be kept, and made livestock
farmers wealthier. Other parts of England were less well suited
in terms of topography and climate for water meadows, but
even so local adaptations promoted the same ends. In some
hilly areas, for instance, ‘catchwork’ meadow systems channelled
water along valley sides before it was run down the hillside to
irrigate the grass. To date, ten examples of water meadows have
been scheduled, mostly in southern England; that at Clattinger
Farm, Oaksey (Wiltshire), is a typical Wessex example. Other
meadowlands are included in the schedulings of monastic
and other extensive sites; these include examples of medieval
water and meadow management systems such as channels and
ditches, the forerunners of the later, more formally engineered,
water meadows. These have a particular interest, as how
meadowland was managed in the Middle Ages (and before)
remains poorly understood.
Another seventeenth-century innovation was the decoy pond,
used to capture ducks and other wildfowl in nets carried
on frames over curving channels called pipes leading off a
main pond. They were especially numerous in the extensive
wetland areas of East Anglia and Somerset, where several are
scheduled. Their hey-day was in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and most had fallen out of use by the early twentieth
century. Overall forty-seven have been scheduled to date, and
a few remain working or have been revived: one at Boarstall
(Buckinghamshire) is operated by the National Trust. Rabbit
warrens remained a popular lordly use of land, especially
marginal ground.
Throughout history the control of grazing animals has been
problematic. Pounds, small brick- or stone-walled enclosures
typically on greens or open spaces in settlements, were used
to confine strays. Most surviving examples are post-medieval,
at least in terms of their fabric, although the use of the location
for this purpose may have been longstanding. Pounds have
sometimes been scheduled in the past; listing will now generally
be the preferred option.
1750-1875
Even fewer historic agricultural assets are scheduled from this
period, although very many historic farm buildings have been
listed. In the later eighteenth century the pace of improvement
in the countryside picked up as higher prices encouraged
landlords to invest, ushering in the era known to historians as
the Agricultural Revolution. While not to ignore the growing
evidence of earlier innovations, key ‘improvers’ like Robert
Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced new ways of farming
and rethought agricultural infrastructure. Alongside new farm
complexes, with Georgian farmhouses standing alongside well
laid-out courtyard farms housing improved breeds of stock,
came a countryside where Acts of Parliament were used to
enable the last phase of enclosure. Much of the midlands’ open
field systems survived until this era, for instance, when they
were enclosed and replaced with extremely regular grid-plan
fields. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with
France (1793-1815) corn prices rose to unprecedented levels,
and attempts – often unsuccessful – were made to enclose
and then bring into cultivation some of England’s highest land.
This has left a distinct archaeology, of abandoned fields (some
with narrow and straight ridge and furrow showing attempts
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 13

Fig 14. Flooding reveals the pattern of extensive post-medieval water meadows in the
Lugg Valley, Herefordshire. Relict farming landscapes such as this provide designation
challenges given their extensiveness; because the land remains in active agricultural use;
and because it often has environmental significance because of its flora and wildlife.
at cereal cultivation) typically demarcated by small and crude
drystone walls, often all but invisible under bracken. Sometimes
the barns and outfarms (see the listing selection guide on
Agricultural Buildings for Field Barns) built to cultivate this
land still stand; elsewhere they have become archaeology as ruins
or earthworks. Artificial saucer-shaped ‘dewponds’ (some are
scheduled, normally as elements of wider landscapes) provided
watering places for stock in what were otherwise waterless
landscapes. The Knight family’s efforts to improve Exmoor provides
a dramatic example of a large-scale attempt at upland improvement;
roads, farms, fields, ponds, and lime kilns were built, trees planted,
and quarries opened to provide sturdy gate posts.
Rabbit warrens proliferated in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, especially on uplands and moorlands where
previously they had been rare; several well-preserved examples,
such as at Merrivale, are scheduled on Dartmoor, for instance.
Rabbits became so cheap they became a foodstuff for the poor.
It was also during this period, in part enabled by new
technology like steam engines, that some of the last, and
inherently most difficult, drainage schemes were undertaken: the
final drainage of the Somerset Levels, for instance, was achieved
by the construction in the years after 1791 of the twelve milelong
King’s Sedgemoor Drain, to replace the River Cary. Many
of the drainage cuts and banks created were massive and ran
for miles; in some cases existing watercourses were adapted,
and the direction of flow reversed. And it was only in the
earlier nineteenth century that the Great Level of the Fens in
eastern England was finally made dry and productive. The 1831
Stretham pumping engine (Cambridgeshire), south of Ely, with
a tall brick chimney visible from far afield and inside a massive
beam engine, is a scheduled monument, although today listing
would be the preferred option for this and similar structures.
With industrialisation, mainly in the mid to late nineteenth
century, the traditional exploitation of wild resources fell away,
although far from ceased. Fish-weirs, for instance, survived on
the River Severn into the twentieth century, and still remain
in use in Minehead Bay (Somerset), little-different in form and
function from their predecessors over thousands of years
(see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/iha-riverfisheries-coastal-fish-weirs/).
1875 to the present
In the later 1870s English agriculture entered its Great
Depression as cheap grain from across the Atlantic and frozen
meat from New Zealand and Argentina combined with poor
harvests to make life difficult for all involved in farming. By this
time the greater part of the population had ceased to live on
the land, and had become predominantly urban. Investment
effectively ceased, land became neglected, and the great
estates began to break up as farms were sold to tenants, a
process which continued well into the 1920s. The two world
wars increased short-term demands for home-grown food
and introduced government support for agriculture (huge
acreages of permanent pasture and upland were ploughed up
to increase arable production), but it was only after the Second
World War that farming became relatively prosperous again.
Then, in 1973, Britain’s entry into the European Union (the
Common Market) made subsidies available to farmers; grain
production in particular expanded, and larger machinery meant
that fields were enlarged and hedges – often of considerable
historic and botanic interest in their own right and as boundary
markers – were grubbed up to facilitate this. More recently, as
a means of regulating the production of agricultural surpluses,
land was been set aside from crop production, and there is
an increasing acreage devoted to the cultivation of biomass in
some areas. All changes have had, and will have, implications for
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 14

Fig 15. Braunton Great Field, Devon. One of England’s few working survivals of open-field
agriculture. Turf baulks separate individual strips.
above- and below-ground archaeological remains of all types,
not just those relating to past agricultural systems.
OVERARCHING DESIGNATION
CONSIDERATIONS
SCHEDULING AND PROTECTION
Archaeological sites and monuments vary greatly in
character, and can be protected in many ways: through
positive management by owners, through policy, and through
designation. In terms of our designation system, this consists
of several separate approaches which operate alongside each
other, and our aim is to recommend the most appropriate
sort of protection for each asset. Our selection guides aim
to indicate our broad approaches, but are subordinate to
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) policy
(see http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/historic_
environment/4171.aspx)
Scheduling, through triggering careful control and the
involvement of English Heritage, ensures that the longterm
interests of a site are placed first. It is warranted for
sites with real claims to national importance which are the
most significant remains which tell our national story, their
overarching cultural value, and the need for close management
of their archaeological potential. Scheduled monuments
possess a high order of significance: they derive this from their
archaeological and historic interest, which may include aspects
of architectural, artistic and even traditional importance too.
Our selection guides aim to indicate some of the grounds of
importance which may be relevant. Scheduled sites are not
generally suited to adaptive re-use.
Scheduling is discretionary: the Secretary of State has a choice
as to whether to add a site to the schedule or not. Scheduling
is deliberately selective: given the ever-increasing numbers of
archaeological remains which continue to be identified and
interpreted, this is unavoidable. The schedule aims to capture a
representative sample of nationally important sites, rather than
be an inclusive compendium of such assets.
Given that archaeological sensitivity is all around us, it is therefore
important that all means of protecting archaeological remains
are recognised. Other designations such as listing can play an
important part here. Other sites may be identified as being of
national importance, but not scheduled: Government policy
affords them protection through the planning system (see
http://www.communities.gov.uk/planningandbuilding/planningsystem/
planningpolicy/planningpolicyframework/), and local authorities
play a key part in managing them through their archaeological
services and Historic Environment Records. Policies for protecting
non-scheduled heritage assets of equivalent significance to
scheduled monuments are explicitly encouraged via the National
Planning Policy Framework (March 2012; http://www.communities.
gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/2116950.pdf). One
of its twelve core principles is that planning should conserve
heritage assets in a manner appropriate to their significance
(para 17). It further states that non-designated archaeological
sites of demonstrable equivalence to scheduled monuments
should be treated as designated heritage assets (para 139). This
makes the identification of such sites all the more important.
Archaeological remains are thus protected by various means
alongside scheduling.
The schedule has evolved over 120 years, and some entries fall
short of modern standards. We are striving to upgrade these
older records as part of our programme of upgrading the
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 15

National Heritage List for England. Where appropriate, we may
recommend revisions to the designations, and improve their
mapping as well.
SELECTION CRITERIA
The particular considerations used by the Secretary of State
when determining whether sites of all types are suitable
for statutory designation through scheduling are set out in
Scheduled Monuments: identifying, protecting, conserving and
investigating nationally important archaeological sites under the
Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 (DCMS,
March 2010). These considerations are under the following
headings: period; rarity and representativity; documentation;
group value; survival/condition; and potential.
SPECIFIC CONSIDERATIONS WHEN
ASSESSING AGRICULTURAL REMAINS
FOR DESIGNATION
As much of the country has been farmed for thousands of
years the potential number of agricultural sites and landscapes
is very considerable indeed. Notably within upland areas
which in modern times have been lightly (if at all) cultivated,
relatively large numbers of sites associated with agriculture are
scheduled. These include some very extensive field systems,
sometimes together with associated settlement remains, and
ceremonial or funerary monuments. Typically, schedulings
include associated remains such as settlements, cairns and
boundaries. However, such extensive schedulings remain the
exception rather than the rule. Elsewhere scheduling has
tended to be reserved for discrete sites or structures, and
often very function-specific ones: shielings (the sites of upland
herdsmens’ huts) and pillow mounds are good examples.
In the past, scheduling was not generally seen as an appropriate
mechanism for the protection of extensive archaeological
landscape features surviving as earthworks in England’s lowlands
because of the strict controls it introduces over large, actively
farmed, areas. That was notably the case with extensive areas of
ridge and furrow, and designated examples usually had a clear
association with contemporary settlement remains. Given the
enormous losses of ridge and furrow to agricultural intensification
since the 1970s, protection of more examples may well be
warranted; one of the Activities within the National Heritage
Protection Plan is a renewed assessment of survival rates.
There has also been limited scheduling of agricultural sites
surviving as crop-mark complexes in intensively-farmed arable
landscapes, but generally these are focussed on ‘set pieces’ such
as Roman villas with surrounding enclosures. This has been
because the interpretation of crop-mark complexes can be
difficult (making a robust case for designation difficult), and also
because designation would not necessarily bring the remains
into more favourable management (due to an agricultural class
consent which underpins scheduling, and which allows specified
agricultural activity to continue).
Similarly, scheduling’s strict controls means it has not been
applied to exceptional examples of working relict landscapes,
such as the strip fields at Braunton (Devon) or actively managed
water meadows, as this would interfere with beneficial
management practices. Scheduling is also unlikely to be a
useful or appropriate course of action – because they are
so extensive – for previously unknown and apparently wellpreserved
relict agricultural landscapes revealed by scientific
survey techniques such as rapid geophysical survey and
lidar. In some cases these stretch for many miles: the multiperiod
prehistoric and later landscape at West Heslerton
(North Yorkshire) is one spectacular discovery of this type.
While there is little doubt about the importance of these wide
landscapes of considerable time-depth, there is little purpose
in scheduling such huge tracts of land, and other management
measures beside scheduling are likely to be more effective in
delivering appropriate protection.
PROTECTION THROUGH
MANAGEMENT
As well as being of interest in their own right, agricultural
landscapes have always provided the setting for our farms,
villages and towns, combining with them to form the English
countryside we know and value. Today, this is increasingly
appreciated and managed in its totality. Historic landscape
characterisation is one current approach which seeks to
systematically link the character of fieldscapes to that of
agricultural buildings. Appreciation of character and protection
through planning policy works alongside designation in
upholding the significance of the countryside. The National
Planning Policy Framework (2012) emphasises the
importance of local distinctiveness (see www.communities.
gov.uk/planningandbuilding/planningsystem/planningpolicy/
planningpolicyframework/).
The countryside is not, and never has been, static. Archaeological
designation can and must co-exist alongside farming and other
land. Considerable effort has been made in the past to work
with farmers, to communicate the interest of the sites they
own and care for, and to encourage positive management
through guidance and grant aid most notably Environmental
Stewardship. Various designation and management regimes
dealing with the natural environment also impact on the historic
environment. One example is the Hedgerow Regulations,
which provide a measure of protection for historic semi-natural
boundaries; other types of boundary (walls and banks, for
instance) and the related patterns of boundary and field
trees, however, lie beyond the Regulations’ scope. As with
characterisation, heritage designations operate alongside other
mechanisms to ensure appropriate protection of significance.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL
English Heritage, England’s Landscape (eight regional volumes,
various authors, 2006)
Pryor, F., The Making of the British Landscape (2011)
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 16

Rackham, O., The History of the Countryside (1986)
Taylor, C., Fields in the English Landscape (1975)
Taylor, C., Village and Farmstead (1983)
Thirsk, J. (general ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales
(8 vols, 1967-2000)
Thirsk, J. (ed.), Rural England: An Illustrated History of the
Landscape (2000)
Yalden, D., The History of British Mammals (1999)
Yalden, D. and Albarella, U., The History of British Birds (2009)
PREHISTORIC
Barrett, J., Fragments from Antiquity (1994)
Bradley, R., The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland (2007)
Cunliffe, B., Iron Age Communities in Britain (4th edn, 2005)
Darvill, T., Prehistoric Britain (1987)
Fairbairn, A. (ed.), Plants in Neolithic Britain and Beyond (2000)
Fleming, A., The Dartmoor Reaves (revised edn, 2007)
Haselgrove, C. and Moore, T. (eds.), The Later Iron Age in Britain
and Beyond (2007)
Haselgrove, C. and Pope, R. (eds.), The Earlier Iron Age in Britain
and the Near Continent (2007)
Parker-Pearson, M., Bronze Age Britain (2005 edn)
Pryor, F., Farmers in Prehistoric Britain (1998)
Pryor, F., Britain BC (2003)
Thomas, J., Understanding the Neolithic (1999)
Yates, D., Land, Power and Prestige: Bronze Age Field Systems in
Southern England (2007)
ROMAN
Dark, K. and P., The Landscape of Roman Britain (1997)
Mattingley, D., An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire
(2006)
ANGLO-SAXON
Hamerow, H., Hinton, D.A. and Crawford, S. (eds), The Oxford
Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology (2011), Part IV (pages
315-401), Food Production
Mingay, G. E. (ed.), The Victorian Countryside (2 vols, 1981)
Overton, M., Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation
of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1850 (1996)
Tarlow, S., The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain, 1750-1850
(2007)
Wade Martins, S., Farms and Fields (1995)
Wade Martins, S., Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes: Rural
Britain 1720-1870 (2004)
Williamson, T., The Transformation of Rural England. Farming and
the Landscape 1700-1870 (2002)
PICTURE CREDITS
Cover: © English Heritage. NMR
Figure 1: © Historic Environment, Cornwall Council, 2008;
F88-37
Figure 2: © English Heritage. NMR
Figure 3: © English Heritage. NMR
Figure 4: ©
Figure 5: © English Heritage. NMR
Figure 6: © Andy Holland/Northamptonshire Archaeology
Figure 7: © Al Oswald
Figures 8, 10, 11, 12, 15: © Paul Stamper
Figure 9: © English Heritage. NMR
Figure 13: © Museum of English Rural Life
Figure 14: © Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust
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MEDIEVAL
Campbell, B.M.S.,The Geography of Seigneurial Agriculture in
Medieval England (2000)
Hall, D., Turning the Plough: Midland Open Field: Landscape
Character and Proposals for Management (2001)
Martin, E. and Satchell, M., Wheare Most Inclosures Be: East
Anglian Fields: History, Morphology and Management (2008)
Williamson, T., Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society,
Economy (2003)
Wrathmell, S. and Roberts, B., An Atlas of Rural Settlement in
England (2000)
POST-MEDIEVAL
Beckett, J.V., The Agricultural Revolution (1990)
Brown, J., Agriculture in England: A Survey of Farming, 1870-1947
(1987)
English Heritage Scheduling Selection Guide
Agriculture 17